Small Business Tech Tips

Hey there domain administrators.  Did you know it was possible to join a computer to your domain remotely?  Not so hard at all.

First, you must have VPN configured on your network.  Your VPN can be configured directly to your firewall, or through your firewall to your Windows Server Routing and Remote Access.  (How to setup PPTP on a Windows Server)

Once you’ve configured your VPN, you are now ready to join computers to the domain remotely.

First, connect to the VPN, so that your computer receives a local IP address from your network.

Next, open your computer properties to join to domain as you normally would internally.  Attempt to join your computer to the domain.  It will prompt you for domain admin credentials if your route has worked, and woila!  your are now joined.  Reboot the computer.

If you don’t get the prompt for domain admin credentials, that most likely means you are not able to ping the domain controller via hostname, and you will need to manually edit your hosts file.

To do this:

1. Goto:  C:\Windows\Syste32\drivers\etc
2. Open your hosts file with Wordpad “Run as Administrator”.  You may need to open Wordpad as an administrator first, and then open the file
3. Goto the bottom of your hosts file and enter the following:  ”IP Address”, Tab 2 X’s, “server name” – where the IP address is the IP of your Domain Controller, and the Server Name is the host name of your Domain Controller.
4. Save the hosts file

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Read more by: Danny Sears

Tags: 2003, 2008, domain, join to domain, join to domain remotely, L2TP, PPTP, remote, remotely, server 2003, server 2008, vpn, Windows 7, windows server, windows xP

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Small Business Computer Tips, Small Business Management Tips, Small Business Mobile Technology Tips, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.